The Coreless Vanguard - The Missing Pages
Archives of the
Cloud-Hidden
Archives of the
Cloud-Hidden
Valley didn’t look like the grand library up on the
Order’s high crest, where glass lanterns hummed with blue light and scholars in indigo silk used silver tongs to turn pages of vellum.Down here, behind the third stone hut, the
Archives were just a long, damp fissure cut fifty feet deep into the black basalt cliff.
It smelled of old river-silt, dried sheep tallow, and the sour, heavy reek of decaying calfskin.
Nobody swept the floor.
Dust sat two inches thick on the low pine shelves, and when the mountain fog rolled through the crack in the ceiling, the paper turned to gray paste in its bindings.Silas knelt in the dirt at the far end of the trench, a brass oil lamp resting on a flat rock beside his knee.His right thumb was still throbbing.
Where the silver needle had vibrated its way through the granite slab two hours ago, his skin felt burnt, the nerve endings raw and twitching.
He spat a dark speck of blood into the dirt—his broken molar was finally settling down, leaving only a dull, hollow ache behind his jaw—and reached into a low wooden chest that sat wedged beneath a fallen rooftimber.Elder
Orion hadn’t told him to clean the chest.
The old turnip-eater had simply grunted something about finding a dry strip of pigskin to wrap around the stone pen’s handle before the ash-wood split again.Silas hauled out a armful of moldy ledgers.
Most of them were thirty years old—tax records from the valley villages, lists of iron ore yields from the lower mines, requisitions for coal and salt pork signed by men whose bones had long since turned to dust under the hemlocks.He tossed three bound rolls aside.
The dust rose in a slow, yellow cloud, making him cough.At the bottom of the chest, wrapped in a square of grease-stained canvas that had turned hard as slate, lay a thin leather portfolio.
It had no brass clasp.
The leather was scarred, stained dark by old river water, and tied shut with a strip of dried sinew.Silas paused.His fingers twitched.
Deep beneath his sternum, the
Shard didn’t throb, but it gave a strange, icy pull—a tiny, directional tug that felt like a needle sliding through cold tallow.He cut the sinew with the edge of his blue-iron dagger.Inside the portfolio were six sheets of thick, unrefined linen paper.
The edges were singed, black and brittle, as if someone had pulled them out of a hearth before the flames could finish the job.Silas smoothed the first page flat against his knee.The handwriting wasn’t the neat, decorative cursive taught in the
It was heavy, angular, and pressed so deep into the rag-paper that the nib had gouged thin trenches through the fibers.Silas knew that stroke.
He had spent seven years staring at it in the back of his father’s ledger by the flickering light of
Wood’s hearth.Arthur
Vance.Silas’s breath hitched in his throat.
He pressed his left palm against the cold basalt floor to steady his balance, his eyes scanning the faded black ink.…Day 14 of the
Expedition, the entry began.
The date at the top was dated fourteen years ago—when
Silas was barely a year old, still sleeping in a wooden cradle near the kitchen chimney.The
Assessors from the
Crest lied about the survey.
There is no copper vein in the
What sits beneath the red clay is not ore.
Impact.Silas’s pulse hammered against his ribs.
He dragged the brass lamp closer, the yellow flame casting long, nervous shadows across the rock face.He turned to the second page.
The ink there was smeared, mixed with faint, rusty stains that looked like dried blood.…Vane knows, his father had written.
The handwriting grew tighter, faster, the letters slanting wildly across the line. Not the current
Proctor, but his father, the
They have known since the
Frost of ’08.
They sent two squads of
House guards into the fissure last spring, but none returned.
The energy does not yield to
Aura-weaves.
It shatters their spell-blades on contact.
It craves flesh.
It craves a vessel.Silas reached up with his linen-wrapped right hand, his callused fingers touching the rough cloth over his heart.They didn’t send my father into the deep mountains to find a cure for me, Silas thought, a cold, sickening realization settling into his stomach like a lump of lead. They didn’t care about a
Coreless boy.He turned to the fourth sheet.
The top half had been torn away, leaving only six jagged lines near the bottom….I have refused to hand over the coordinates.
They called it treason against the
Vance—my own uncle—signed the requisition order for my squad’s rations.
The grain was poisoned with slow-root, and our horses were turned loose in the night near the
Stalker drifts.If
I do not return from the northern ridge, it will not be the beasts that finished me.
It will be the
Inquisitors.
Vane told me plainly before we left the gate: “The
Order cannot permit a rogue
Blade to hold the key to an
If you will not bring it to the
Crest, you will stay in the snow.”To whoever finds this in the lower stacks—keep the boy away from the
They do not want scholars.
They want a lock.The text ended there.Silas sat frozen in the damp dark of the fissure.The wind howled through the crack in the rock fifty feet above, carrying the faint, dry smell of pine needles and old snow.
Far off, from the upper terraces of the
Order, the deep copper bell chimed four times, signaling the midnight shift for the ward-sentries.Silas didn’t move.For seven years, he had lived with the image of his father as a tragic, desperate man—a noble commander who had ruined his reputation, spent his family’s fortune, and finally thrown his life away in the frozen wilderness out of a foolish, hopeless love for a useless,
Coreless son.For seven years,
Silas had carried the guilt of that sacrifice like a sack of rocks on his shoulders.
Every time his cousins mocked him, every time
Vance looked at him with cold contempt, every time
Wood coughed over the cabbage pot,
Silas had told himself that his existence was the weight that had dragged his father into the mud.It was a lie.All of it.
A neat, comfortable lie spun by the men in the indigo silk robes up top.Arthur
Vance hadn’t died looking for a rare mountain herb.
He had been hunted down like a rogue dog in the snow because he wouldn’t let
Vane’s predecessors turn a piece of fallen star into a weapon for their high tower.
Vance—his own blood, his father’s uncle—had signed the papers that cut their rations and left them to freeze.Silas’s hands didn’t tremble.Slowly, deliberately, he folded the six burned sheets of linen paper, sliding them inside the inner pocket of his coat, resting them right against the leather spine of his father’s journal and the hard, jagged
Shard sitting next to his ribs.He didn’t feel a surge of wild, screaming rage.
The fire that usually ignited his blood when he thought of his cousins was gone, replaced by a cold, absolute silence that felt heavier than the thousand-pound granite pen.He reached down, picked up the brass oil lamp, and stood up.His bad left knee clicked softly in the quiet, but he didn’t stumble.
He looked toward the mouth of the fissure—toward the dark, windowless huts of the
Cloud-Hidden
Valley, and beyond them, toward the soaring, white marble towers of the
Crest glowing faintly under the winter stars.They thought he was a soot-boy.
They thought he was an illiterate,
Coreless butcher who had survived the pit by sheer, brute luck.Silas closed his fingers around the grip of his blue-iron dagger inside his pocket, feeling the eighteen rough, carved nodes beneath the canvas wrap.”They want a lock,” Silas whispered to the dark walls of the fissure, his voice flat, dry, and stripped of every drop of warmth.He turned his back on the chest, blew out the brass lamp, and walked out into the cold night.